


Out of Breath

by FaiaHae



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast), The Adventure Zone: Amnesty (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Artist Boyd Mosche, Boyd Mosche is a Good Man, Character Death, Hanahaki AU, Hanahaki Disease, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Language of Flowers, M/M, Mind the Tags, Minor Character Death, Ned's Family - Freeform, Spoilers for the recent arc, Symbolism, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-26 16:41:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19009723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FaiaHae/pseuds/FaiaHae
Summary: Boyd believes in Hanahaki, but he thinks love’s for suckers.





	Out of Breath

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to theneonpineapple for betaing and threatening to kill me!

Ned thinks Hanahaki’s a myth till his sister dies of it.

 

He doesn’t understand- keeps trying to convince her (quietly, because dad can’t know, dad  _ can’t _ know, Elizabeta’s in love with a straight girl and-) to go to the doctor. Please, please, Liza, just go to the doctor. Please.

 

She smiles at him, and he’s 16, she’s only 17, but it feels like there are decades between them when she says, rasping around the petals in her throat ( _ Gypsophila.  _ Baby’s breath. The irony’s going to haunt him till he fucking dies, proof that the gods have got  _ no _ sense of humor) and she says  _ you’ll understand, someday. _

 

And she dies, and as he leaves the house for the last time he hopes he  _ never does. _

 

___

 

Boyd believes in Hanahaki, but he thinks love’s for suckers.

 

He breaks hearts left and right- boys and girls, and he’s had three people coughing up flowers before he’s graduated from high school. Aster- purple, white, red. Wisdom, innocence, devotion.

 

What a joke.

 

Two confess, one gets the surgery and he only finds out because her best friend comes up to him in the hallway and breaks his nose. 

 

Packed a hell of a punch. 

 

He didn’t want anybody to  _ die  _ for him, not really. He’s not sure this is much better, the way she slinks around the halls like a ghost, staring at nothing. 

 

So Boyd Mosche stays clear of girls, and boys, and makes it a point to let the people that confess to him down easy, so that no one’s afraid to talk to him again, and then he drops out and he’s in the wind, and he gets on a plane to America, bloody sea aster petals in his head, and he hopes he never sees them again. 

__

 

When Ned meets Boyd, he likes him more then he should, so he takes him to bed, and then he tells him that he’s not looking for anything serious. Boyd snorts and asks if criminal partnership counts as serious, and Ned thinks they’re going to get along just  _ fine. _

 

He doesn’t think about baby’s breath again for years, but his chest’s been getting tighter around Boyd. Something hurts, like it’s clawing its way out, and Boyd’s been soft with him, Boyd’s been falling asleep next to him for years, but Ned always said he’d never do this. He’d never settle down. 

 

So he’s tense like a bowstring, and he says that this job’ll be the last one. He says he’s done, and Boyd-

 

Boyd looks like somebody slapped him.

 

And then he starts coughing.

 

And they have a job to do, and they do it, and Boyd’s angry- of course Boyd is angry, Ned’s said something, Ned’s leaving, Ned’s always leaving. And the car goes off the road.

 

And Ned makes good on his word, for once.

 

He leaves.

___

 

Honestly, dying in prison isn’t so bad, Boyd just wishes he’d die a little faster.

 

The other inmates give him a wide berth, as though what he have is something they could catch. The guards treat him well, help him up when he collapses. For a long time, it’s not that bad- a little bit of a cough, exhaustion that creeps into his bones. He’s started blacking out. Honestly, it could have been any number of things.

 

Nevermind the fact that he’d been sick since the night Ned Chicane looked him in the eyes and told him that he never wanted to see him again. 

 

He could have denied it a little bit longer, too, except for the night that Saturday Night Dead came on TV, and Boyd saw Ned Chicane, in a big theatrical costume, smiling and talking with his hands, the way he always did, and he saw it for just a moment, tried to speak- and then he was on the floor, and the other inmates were moving away from him, and a guard had a hand on his shoulder, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying, because his lungs were closing, there was something in his throat, and he coughed with a force that had his whole body trembling, and he was on his hands and knees, and he raised his hands to his mouth as he coughed, and as he pulled back-

 

There were flower petals in his palms and on the ground around him, and for a moment his brain refused to make the jump, refused to admit what he was seeing, and then he recognized them.

 

Forget-me-nots.

 

_____

 

When Ned starts coughing, he decides he must have caught something from Victoria, and pays it no more mind. If he dies, he fucking dies, and that’s all there is to it, at this point. 

 

And anyway, it gets better, over the years. He ignores the way his lungs ache, chalks it up to old age. Pushes it further and further down, keeps it where the memory of Boyd’s expression the night before the heist still haunts him. Where he keeps the pendant, and the rest of his secrets. 

 

He lies to himself better then he lies to anyone else, and he lies to everyone else pretty goddamn well. 

 

And then Boyd gets into his car in the parking lot, and for a moment, there’s an easy familiarity. Something in the way Boyd smiles reminds Ned of the old Boyd- the man who’d tell him stories about home, stories about his sisters. 

 

Boyd used to tell him about the trips he took with his families, picking flowers. Boyd used to talk about daffodils like a painter, describing the way their petals took shape and moved in the wind. 

 

And Ned feels it.

  
Something in his chest.

 

And he needs to get Boyd out of the car, and so they fight- like they used to, like the always did, and Boyd leaves, this time, and when he’s gone Ned puts his head between his knees and he tries to breathe, but his lungs heave and all that comes out are flowers- daffodils and aster, and Ned tries to tell himself that the tears in his eyes are just from the sting of his lungs.

 

He drives the car away. 

 

If Duck and Aubrey notice the petals on the carpet, they don’t say anything.

 

____

 

Boyd doesn’t get the chance to confess.

 

____

 

Ned finds Boyd’s body in the closet, and his neck’s broken, but there’s blood in the corner of his mouth, and there are flowers in the trash. Forget-me-nots are ground into the carpet- and Ned’s furious at himself, furious he didn’t notice the first time, that the cough threw him off and he didn’t notice that there was no sound behind it, that it was a fucked-up coincidence. 

 

There were no flowers in the mimic’s throat.

 

He should have known.

 

___

 

When Aubrey leaves, Ned doesn’t pack. He sits down against the wall, and he pulls out an old sketchbook he’d found in Boyd’s things. There are pressed flowers between the pages- preserved in wax, from lots of different places. There are sketches of fields, of people Ned’s never met- a few he can still recognize. Boyd’s sisters, his mother. A few self-portraits. 

 

Ned’s favorites are the ones Boyd drew of the two of them- mock-ups for disguises they never got to try, recreations of polaroids Ned threw out. 

 

Ned’s not quite on the last page when it hits him- his lungs seizing, the cough breaking him in half, and finally, as blood splashes onto the page, the flowers close his throat for good.

 

He understands Eliza, after all. 


End file.
